Sept-Ember Censer: Overview
2024-11-05 // IOTM Overview
Do you remember the 21st night of September? No? Well, you should. It's important! You should go watch one of Demi Adejuyigbe's several educational films detailing many ways you can remember the 21st. After all -- after the Sept-Ember Censer, anyone trying to speedrun KOL better remember September.
General Summary
Flavor-wise, the Sept-Ember Censer is a censer -- in case you aren't familiar with the term, it's a vessel used for incense and perfume, especially during religious ceremonies. You can stoke the fires of your censer every day. You get seven embers per day. To break the immersion and theming, the Sept-Ember Censer is (effectively) a shop. It's similar to the 2003 Mr. Store or the Spinmaster Lathe. Every day, you get some currency (embers), and you can spend your embers on various useful things from the censer. Interestingly, unspent embers are lost on ascension, but not on rollover, so you can hoard it! (EDITOR'S NOTE: TES is right. It appears I have 337 embers. I am an unhealthy man. -- Scotch)
The most useful items within the censer, by our estimation, are...
- For 1 ember, the bembershoot (melting accessory for +5 cold resistance)
- For 2 embers, the Mmm-brr! brand mouthwash (a usable item that grants stats based on your current cold resist)
- For 2 embers, the throwin' ember (a deeply strange damaging banish that needs to kill the target to actually work)
- For 4 embers, the structural ember (+5/5 bridge parts)
Although there are other items in the shop, these are the ones that will see regular use. To look at the other items, check out the wiki!
Speedrun Applicability
Three of the primary items are (honestly) very easy to summarize.
- The bembershoot can make surviving cold damage from A-Boo Peak much easier, and synergizes well with the mouthwash.
- The structural ember's bridge parts are quite useful; even when maxing out Blech House, it still takes 12-16 turns to cap your bridge, giving you (on average) about 4.5 bridge parts per turn. This is 10, for free, worth (effectively) 2.2 turns of value.
- Finally, the throwin' ember is a killbanish, which is both uncommon and useful in that you get to keep the monster's drops. This is very helpful for zones where there are monsters you don't want to see more than once, such as an Elegant Animated Nightstand or (perhaps) the final Pygmy Witch Accountant.
However, if you're looking for the real reason to get this item, look no further than the Mmm-brr! brand mouthwash. It's important enough that we're going to spend the entire synergies section talking about it!
2024 In-Standard Synergies
If you looked at what your powerleveling options would be in a post-trainset, post-goose world, you may have been a little nervous. There really weren't any options in standard that allowed you to gain stats quickly. The Mmm-brr mouthwash solves that entirely; it's a format-warping item that warps your existing toolkit as well as IotM design for the next 2 years.
Mmm-brr! brand mouthwash gives stats equal to 7 * C^1.7 to your mainstat and half that to your offstats. Here is a sampling of how many substats you stand to gain from good dental hygiene:
10 cold res: 350 substats 15 cold res: 699 substats 20 cold res: 1140 substats 30 cold res: 2271 substats 40 cold res: 3703 substats 50 cold res: 5412 substats
As you can see, the gain is exponentially better the higher you can boost your Cold Resistance. You need 10,816 substats to reach level 11 or 15,625 for level 12, which means using 2 mouthwashs at high enough cold resistance can completely solve leveling for you.
With that in mind, let's take a look at the Cold resistance sources available from other IotMs currently available:
3 Jurassic Parka 2 Apriling band tuba 2 tearaway pants 15 bembershoot (you can equip 3 of this guy!) 3 Scroll of minor invincibility 3 Imagining Guts from the Book of Facts 2 Mayam wall buff
With just the Censer and some perms, you can get more than 2000 substats per mouthwash. Throw in every cold resist source currently in Standard, and you can rocket to level 11 before turn 11!
2024 Aftercore Synergies
As far as I can tell, this item has very few aftercore uses. You can sell the items, but with everyone else doing that as well, they aren't exactly valuable. There are two major uses for this IotM outside of Standard Ascension: fighting embering hulks, and using mouthwash after breaking the prism.
The miniature Embering Hulk is a 6-cost item that triggers a 1/day fight with an embering hulk. You need to fight 21 of the Hulk to collect enough hunks to make a familiar -- the Emberiza Aureola. If you have the Roman Candelabra, you don't really -need- this familiar for speedrunning. Technically, it's a better yellow ray than the yellow candle; it's only 50 turn duration, which is cool. But as it will overlap in standard with the Chest Mimic, it's unlikely you'll have a ton of time in your runs where you are generating a ton of experience, and it costs 100 familiar XP to shoot off your yellow ray. If you lack the Randle, though, you should pick this up -- there may be a handful of times it saves your bacon in future metas.
Regarding mouthwash as an aftercore tool, the abundance of cheap cold resistance sources means that mouthwash may be a more efficient method of powerleveling than fighting scaling monsters. If you were to accumulate 100 cold res (which is pretty easy now), each mouthwash would be worth 17500 substats. Quite a good deal for less than 5000 meat!
Overall Rating
We'd rate the Sept-Ember Censer a tier 1 IotM. It's a bit of a funny one. Powerleveling can be worth 15-20 turns per run of savings through routing simplification, survivability, and resource savings. If you have an IOTM suite that isn't fully decked out, it could save even more! After day 1, when your powerleveling is over, this is worth about 2-3 turns per day. It's highly likely that this will be the central method of powerleveling for the next Standard rotation. Put it all together, you have something that's worth 15-20 turns a day in a 1-day run, 10 turns a day in a 2-day run, and 7-ish turns a day in a 3-day run. Quite a powerful tool, and well worth picking up! Stoke your embers, folks.